Problems with the Gnome Online Desktop
Okay, this post just crystalized my problems with this whole “Gnome Online Desktop” issue. It’s a difference between Online Apps (webapps) and Network Intergation. The Online Desktop people seem to confuse the two. Here’s an important quote from that post:
From GUADEC I noticed an excellent behavior that consistently happened because of the spotty internet access available during the conference. Stealthily from behind, I could catch the profiled looks of despondence as people clicked on the different wireless connections. Continuously attempting to access “the internet”, but what for? If our desktop and it’s applications are so cool offline, why the need to be… online?
See, computers these days generally need to be connected to the Internet to be useful, but they don’t need Online Applications to be useful. Many of us greatly prefer to have local applications and primarly local data, mainly because web apps suck in terms of UI and usablility, but also because those apps are still useful when I’m not online.
Take email as the cannonical example. The Online Desktop people, as far as I can see, all use gmail. Every one of them. They love it, because it makes them independent of which computer they’re on. However, to use anything email related, they need to be online.
I use evo. It’s not the greatest program in existence. It’s not the fastest program in existence. But it’s UI experience is generally so much better than gmail that it’s not even funny. Also, and this is what’s more important to me, all my email is available even when I’m offline. It’s all there to search, and I use that archive a lot. Privacy issues asside, it’s much more convenient. Of course, to get this convenience, I’m tied to my laptop (which isn’t a problem for me; if I don’t have my laptop, it’s because I don’t want to do computer related things).
Now, this is the main point. Evo is not an offline app, in general. It is a fully networked app, that makes use of the Internet as it’s primary source of information to fulfill it’s primary purpose: to deliver email to me. It is a networked application. It is not an online application. It lives quite happily on my computer. If the web went away tomorrow, email would still work for me. If google turned evil, and decided to charge $100 per day to access gmail, evo would continue to work.
I’m all for a networked desktop. This is a great thing, but it’s not new. f-spot integrates with flikr nicely. Evo integrates with email nicely. Mugshot’s deskbar integrates with mugshot nicely. Google desktop integrates with google nicely. All of these are desktop apps, not web apps. I do not want (and I suspect you’ll find most people don’t want) web apps for everything. They only use them because the alternative is not polished.
So, rather than putting our deskop into firefox (which is a horrible idea…) and turning it into just another web app, make good, solid desktop apps that integrate well with networked services. Your users will thank you for it, and will actually switch to Gnome for a better experience, rather than just staying with firefox on windows.
So, to answer the question from the quote: They were online to be Networked, not to run Online Applications.
“So, rather than putting our deskop into firefox (which is a horrible idea…) and turning it into just another web app, make good, solid desktop apps that integrate well with networked services.”
You seem to confuse the Online Desktop with Pyrodesktop which is something totally different. Putting the desktop into Firefox was never an idea for the GNOME Online Desktop.
No, I’m not really confusing the two. All the Online Desktop advocates seem to have jumped on pyrodesktop as their poster child. It’s the same people hyping Online Desktop that think pyrodesktop is a good idea.
I really have to disagree here, neither was this ever discussed at GUADEC, nor is there ANY mention of PyroDesktop on
http://online-desktop.org/wiki/Online_Desktop
(which is the official wiki for the online desktop)
or here:
http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop
So I’m not quite sure where you got that impression, but it’s definately wrong, PyroDesktop is in no way a part of the GNOME Online Desktop stuff, just because some people might like both, doesn’t mean, that they are the same
That’s nice to know, but it it doesn’t change my argument. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned pyrodesktop at all, except that it’s the one thing to hit recently that’s more annoying than online desktop, and (accroding to the blogs I follow), it seemed to be related.
PyroDesktop and the Online Desktop are only related in vague terms. You could say that some of us working towards the Online Desktop idea find the PyroDesktop interesting, but that doesn’t mean much. So the relation of the two is probably only the word “online” or firefox and not much more.
To one of your points, I don’t think you can use this generalization of “web apps”, simply because it’s too vague. Google Reader is an good example of something that’s a “web app” and I think is excellent in terms of UI and usability YMMV. Also Google Reader works offline as well as online, using the Google Gears firefox add-on you can read all your blogs from your laptop even when you’re not connected. That’s just one example of how a web app is becoming more than on the web.
And I think you’re right on that computers need to be connected to be useful. Even if you write emails in evo while you’re offline, that doesn’t make a difference if you never get evo connected again. But being able to access my data from anywhere is just a really nice part of using web apps, something that’s not possible in evolution.
The Online Desktop is about creating a desktop environment where your information isn’t lost and is available from more places. Creating a web mail interface could be an option, but it’s also possible to bring evo closer to being an Online Application like that. If evolution were to save my account information to the Online Desktop service, I could get access to my email from most any Linux machine with much less effort than would normally require. And preferences like forwarding messages inline would be saved across these sessions. These seem like simple things, but GMail and other web mail apps already do this. I don’t need to reconfigure them whenever I purchase a new computer.
I like how you’re hitting on an issue that a lot of people raise about moving ever application to the web or into firefox. When really it’s about making applications more connected to web or intenet services and making the desktop more aware of the accounts I posses on different web services so my applications can integrate with them.